Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist


Book Description

Samuel Roth is known to most literary scholars as a bold literary "pirate" for issuing unauthorized editions of modernist sensations, including Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the absence of an international copyright agreement and because works deemed obscene could not be copyrighted, what he did was not illegal. But it did violate the protocols of mutual fair dealing between publishers and authors. Those publications provoked an unprecedented international protest of writers, publishers, and intellectuals, who eventually vilified Roth on two continents. Roth was a man with an uncanny ability to recognize good contemporary writing and make it accessible to popular audiences. Ultimately, his dedication to the publication of these works broke down many of the censorship laws of the time, though he suffered greatly for his efforts. His story portrays a struggle with literary censorship in the mid-twentieth century while providing insights into how modernism was marketed in America.




Shadow Archives


Book Description

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history. Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.




Maurice Samuel


Book Description

"This short intellectual biography reassesses one of the premier Jewish humanists of the mid-twentieth century, the Rumanian-born, English-educated, American belletrist Maurice Samuel. Although he spoke in a staccato Midlands accent, Samuel left Manchester, England in 1913, joined the American Army, served in military intelligence in World War I, and became a United States citizen. Samuel resettled his family in Palestine in 1929, then returned to the US, and spent his most creative years in New York City. A diaspora intellectual, or "rootless cosmopolitan," as Alan Levenson describes him, Samuel made an indelible mark on many features of contemporary Jewish thought and culture"--




The Cambridge History of American Modernism


Book Description

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.




Modernism and the Law


Book Description

Exploring critical legal issues and cases of the period-from Oscar Wilde's prosecution for gross indecency to legal bans on such publications as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and James Joyce's Ulysses-Modernism and the Law is the first book to survey the legal contexts of transatlantic Anglo-American modernist culture. Written by one of the leading authorities on the subject, the book covers such topics as: · Obscenity laws and censorship · Copyrights, moral rights, and the public domain · Patronage and literary piracy · Privacy, defamation, publicity, and blackmail Including an annotated list of relevant statutes, treaties, and cases, this is an essential read for scholars and students coming to the subject for the first time as well as for experienced scholars.




Forgotten Intellectual Property Lore


Book Description

This innovative book explores forgotten disputes over intellectual property and the ways in which creative people and sovereigns have managed these disputes throughout the centuries. With a focus on reform, it raises important questions about the resilience of legal rules and challenges the methodology behind traditional legal analyses. Focusing on lore and traditions, expert contributors incorporate contextual understandings that are rooted in history, sociology, political science, and literary studies into their analyses.




“Your friend if ever you had one”– The Letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce


Book Description

Giving her back her voice, the long-lost letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce uniquely document her unwavering support even beyond her role as publisher of Ulysses, while also revealing her difficulties with his demanding personality and signs of their eventual breach.




Rewriting Joyce's Europe


Book Description

This book sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce’s two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World War I and II.




Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs


Book Description

Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman’s prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the forbidden.Susan G. Davis follows the life and times of the figure driven to share what he found in civilization's secret libraries. Self-taught and fiercely unaffiliated, Legman collected the risqué on street corners and in theaters and dug it out of little-known archives. If the sexual humor he uncovered often used laughter to disguise hostility and fear, he still believed it indispensable to the human experience. Davis reveals Legman in all his prickly, provocative complexity as an outrageous nonconformist thundering at a wrong-headed world while reveling in conflict, violating laws and boundaries with equal abandon, and pursuing love and improbable adventures. Through it all, he maintained a kaleidoscopic network of friends, fellow intellectuals, celebrity admirers, and like-minded obsessives.




Are Racists Crazy?


Book Description

The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.